A change in plans

As I mentioned in the last post, Saturday was supposed to be a long ride. I figured that I did a long ride two weekends ago, then a (sort of) long run one weekend ago, so Saturday should have been a long ride. Then I would transition to a three week cycle: long ride, brick, long run. Well, it looked like it would be a little more convenient to get in a pretty full day with the family to do a shorter workout than a 3-3.5 hour ride. So... time for my first brick of the season!

The brick started out ok... I had a pretty good ride. Sure, I tried going up Cooper Mountain, my arch nemesis which gains ~400 ft in ~3/4 mile (that's a ~10% grade!), and the score is now Cooper 3, Mike 0. However, at least this time I got up the first steep wall and actually had a little acceleration across the first false flat before the second steep incline. With some solid training this summer, I should be beating that thing sometime before the half-Ironman. I hope.

70 minutes after setting out, I got back to the house. Made a pretty quick transition - changed shirts (yep, I don't have a tri singlet yet, and I wasn't going to run in a long-sleeve thick cycling jersey), plopped on my shoes and iPod and headed out the door. And of course, my legs felt like I was running through wet cement. Or oatmeal. Or mud. Or maybe all three. My planned run was going to be a 4 mile run, but after a mile... ugh. My legs were starting to feel better, but the digestive system was warning me something was up. I cut it short, got home without any incidents, and called it a day. But when I checked out my Nike+ workout summary, I got a pretty good laugh:

What exactly is that? Was I really speeding up and slowing down that much? Is that what a bricked run looks like? Looks like I need to work on the bricks a bit more...

Right now, I'm still fighting off whatever bug came on during the run, but hopefully tomorrow I'll be able to get back to training and put in a couple of solid runs on Tues & Wed. Maybe even get in a mid-week ride? Would love to get to the point where there's only one rest day per week, because I need to put in some serious focus on burning some calories (and not putting them back on) if I ever want to even the score on Cooper Mountain!